The winner of the 2026 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize is “Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State” by Caleb Gayle (Penguin Random House).
For two decades, the Center for Great Plains Studies’ book prize has celebrated the most outstanding work about the Great Plains during the past year, chosen by an independent group of scholars.
In the book, also longlisted for the National Book Award, Gayle recounts the extraordinary tale of Edward McCabe, a Black man who championed the idea to create a state within the U.S. governed by and for Black people — and the racism, politics and greed that thwarted him. As the sweeping changes brought by the Civil War and Reconstruction began to wither, anger at the opportunities available to newly freed Black people rose and both Black and white people searched for new places to settle. That was when McCabe, a businessman and a rising political star in the American West, set in motion his plans to found a state. His chosen site: Oklahoma, a place that the U.S. government had deeded to Indigenous people in the 1830s when it forced thousands of them to leave their homes under Indian Removal.
“I hope readers gather that ‘Black Moses’ is but one story — of many — about the varied ways people and places we all too often overlook still help us understand our country,” Gayle said. “McCabe's story, in some important sense, is our collective story of ambitiously pursuing a place in America.”
Gabriel Bruguier, book prize committee chair and assistant professor in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries, said Gayle’s prose and style are remarkable as he recounts the “often fraught maneuvering and twists of fate of McCabe’s journey.”
“McCabe built towns for African Americans looking to escape the dire situation in the South during Reconstruction, but really, the call was for all African Americans who longed to build a life on their own terms,” Bruguier said. “He held political office in Kansas at a time when Black politicians were practically unheard of.”
Gayle said winning the Stubbendieck prize was a surprise but affirms his goal of helping readers see this part of the country for all its diversity and rich complexity.
Gayle is an award-winning journalist and author of “We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity and Power.” A professor at Northeastern University in Boston, he is also a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.
Along with a $10,000 cash prize, book prize winners are invited to present a lecture on the book's topic in Lincoln during the fall semester. First-edition, full-length, nonfiction books copyrighted in 2025 were eligible for the award, which Jim and Cheryl Stubbendieck have supported since 2005.
Other finalists were:
- “Chitto Harjo: Native Patriotism and the Medicine Way” by Donald L. Fixico (Yale University Press)
- “Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest” by Jameson R. Sweet (University of Minnesota Press)
